Many people, such as soldiers, police, fire fighters, rescue workers, etc., work under hazardous and life-threatening conditions. Many other people are at increased risk of injury or death as the result of a chronic health condition, or complications resulting from the treatment of acute illness, disability, or advancing age. Other people suffer from chronic, or at least sustained, conditions that require long-term monitoring and treatment. People in all of these circumstances may benefit from continuous monitoring, automatic real-time analysis, and proactive reporting of important changes in their health, physiology, activity state, or environmental conditions. Furthermore, those who are responsible for diagnosing, caring for, rescuing, treating, or developing medications for such individuals may also benefit significantly from such monitoring by allowing more timely, less risky, and less expensive interventions. For example, soldiers, fire fighters, rescue workers, and many other first-responders work under hazardous conditions. These individuals could benefit greatly from advance warning of hazardous environmental conditions, fatigue, illness, or other problems. Such information could allow for improved performance, the avoidance of injury or death, and the timely notification of individuals, team members, and rescue workers in the event that unusual hazards are detected or intervention is needed. Furthermore, in situations where intervention resources are limited or rescue is difficult or dangerous, this information could be invaluable for risk management and triage, allowing individuals in the field, team-members, and rescue workers to make better decisions about such matters as the deployment of human resources. By providing individuals, team-members, and rescuers with salient, timely information, everyone involved benefits from improved situation awareness and risk management.
Likewise, for those suffering from acute or chronic illness, or for those who are at elevated risk for illness or injury, the timely detection and automated reporting of life-threatening injury, disease onset, or medical complication could mean the difference between life and death. Even more valuable than the automatic detection of a crisis may be the reporting of danger signs or leading indicators that may allow a crisis to be avoided all together.
Humans respond differently to different conditions. For example, stressors such as heat and dehydration become critical at different levels for different people. Further, a person with heart disease has a different cardiovascular response that a person with heart disease. In short, people respond somewhat differently to stimuli and stressors than other people. An effective monitoring system would take this into account.
Information relevant to attempts to address these problems includes work at the U.S. Army Research Institute of Environmental Medicine (USARIEM), a part of Natick Laboratories of the United States Army. The USARIEM discloses a hand-sized monitor that miniaturizes Bruel and Kjaer instruments for measuring wet bulb and dry bulb temperature that have transformed heat risk assessment. Data from this monitor is translated to an algebraically calculated estimate of risk from heat stress for lowered productivity or work stoppage and heat prostration. This device is not based on any individual's data. That is, the device assumes that all people are the same. The device is a local monitor, lacking the proactive remote notification features.
Another device in the conventional art is the hand-held doctor project of Richard DeVaul and Vadim Gerasimov of the MIT Media Lab. The hand-held doctor includes a device having sensors for temperature, heart beating and breathing to be used to monitor a child's body. The hand-held doctor further includes infra-red connectivity to a robot which performed actions that reflected the measurements. The first and only prototype of the hand-held doctor system included a small personal Internet communicator-based (i.e., PIC-based) computer with analog-to-digital converters and a radio frequency transmitter, three hand-built sensors, a robot with a receiver, and a software program. The sensors included a thermosensor to measure body temperature, a thermistor-based breathing sensor, and an IR reflectance detector to check the pulse.
Also developed at the MIT Media Lab, the “Hoarder Board,” designed by Vadim Gerasimov, had the purpose of collecting large amounts of sensor data. The board can be configured and programmed for a range of data acquisition tasks. For example, the board can record sound with a microphone add-on board or measure electrocardiographic data, breathing, and skin conductivity with a biometric daughter board. The board can use a CompactFlash device to store sensor information, a two-way radio modem or a serial port to communicate to a computer in real time, and a connector to work in a wearable computer network. When combined with a biometric daughter board or multi-sensor board, the system is capable of physiology monitoring or activity monitoring with local (on-device) data storage. The board also supported a simple low-bandwidth point-to-point radio link, and could act as a telemonitor. The board has a small amount of processing power provided by a single PIC microcontroller and a relatively high overhead of managing the radio and sensors.
Further conventional art includes products of BodyMedia Co. of Pittsburgh, Pa. BodyMedia provides wearable health-monitoring systems for a variety of health and fitness applications. The core of the BodyMedia wearable is a sensing, recording, and analysis device worn on the upper arm. This device measures several physiological signals (including heart rate, skin temperature, skin conductivity, and physical activity) and records this information for later analysis or broadcasts it over a short-range wireless link. The BodyMedia wearable is designed to be used in conjunction with a server running the BodyMedia analysis software, which is provided in researcher and end-user configurations, and in an additional configuration that has been customized for health-club use.
Other conventional wearable remote monitoring systems include alert systems that set off an alert when a condition exceeding a selected threshold is detected. One example of such a system is the Personal Alert Safety System (PASS) worn by firefighters.
It remains desirable to have a method and apparatus for wearable monitoring with real-time classification of data.